An Effective Autofocus Method for Fast Factorized Back-Projection

Back-projection (BP) is a reliable synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging algorithm because of its high-resolution and strong adaptability. However, it is hard to implement because of its high computational complexity. Fast factorized BP (FFBP) is a new way to fix this problem. Like traditional BP, FFBP is compatible with arbitrary flight paths if the track deviations are measured within fractions of a wavelength. However, when the motion information is not accurate enough, autofocus become an important way to get well-focused images. In this paper, we present an effective autofocus method for FFBP to solve the imaging problem caused by platform’s motion errors. First, an image quality evaluation function with unknown phase error based on image sharpness for FFBP is established. Then, the phase error computation for autofocus is modeled as an optimization problem. Second, the coordinate descent (CD) and secant processing are introduced to the maximum image sharpness problem. The proposed method keeps the rapid imaging performance of FFBP and solves well the motion error compensation problem. In the end, simulated data and real data were used to verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

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